by Leo Tolstoy
A year later, in Paris in March 1857, the tourist Tolstoy took in the sights and touched on the same bruised spot:
Got up at 7 feeling ill and went to see an execution. A stout, white, strong neck and chest. He kissed the Gospels and then— death. How senseless! The impression it made was a strong one and not wasted on me. Morality and art. I know, I love, and I can.
The last line of that diary entry is significant, and will reverberate through Tolstoy’s later work.
One immediate consequence was a slight story, “Three Deaths,” written in January 1858. It contrasts the deaths of a lady, a peasant, and a tree. Predictably, the lady anticipates death with terrified evasion. She is traveling to Italy in vain hope of a cure, her entourage of bullied lady’s maid, doctor, and weak husband reluctantly in tow. The stuffy carriage smells of eau de cologne and dust. Terminally tubercular, fretful, and self-deceiving, the lady is, as Tolstoy wrote to a friend, “pitiful and bad.” Every failure to help her face death is sentimentally justified: “Oh my God!” her husband says. “Think of me, having to remind her about her will. I can’t tell her that.”
At a coaching inn where they stop for refreshments, a dying peasant coughs on the Dutch oven in the kitchen. Sergei, the coachman’s boy, asks him a favor: “I expect you don’t need your new boots now; won’t you let me have them?” “Need them indeed!” the cook snaps. “What does he want with boots? They won’t bury him in boots.” The euphemistic lies of the gentry contrast sharply with brutal peasant honesty. In mild acquiescence, the dying man gives up his unused new boots. The coachman’s boy agrees to put a stone on his grave in exchange.
That night the peasant dies in his sleep. Next spring, the lady dies in her town house, without ever reaching Italy. Even as she receives the last sacrament her attention is distracted by the priest’s recommendation of a local quack. Later, the deacon reads the Psalms over the dead body—monotonously, through his nose, without understanding the words. But beyond the door of the death chamber, there is renewal—children’s voices and the patter of feet. And what do the words of the Psalms actually say? They, too, speak of renewal. “Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled: thou takest away their breath, they die, and return to their dust. Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created: and thou renewest the face of the earth.”
In the coaching inn, the cook rebukes Sergei, the coachman’s boy, for failing to keep his promise. If he can’t afford a stone, he should at least mark the grave with a wooden cross.
As the dawn mists disperse, Sergei’s axe strokes can be heard, and a tree falls.
Tolstoy’s letter about this parable is explicit. The lady has lied all her life and lies in the face of death. Her understanding of Christianity cannot resolve the questions of life and death. The peasant dies in peaceful accord with the natural laws that governed his years of sowing and harvesting, delivering calves and slaughtering cattle. The tree dies “calmly, honestly, and gracefully.” The adverbs are pointedly anthropomorphic.
The loaded contrast between the gentry’s reluctance to confront death and the equanimity of the peasants, who have known a lifetime’s hardship, recurs in “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” and “Master and Man.” The irrelevance of formal religion is also repeated, and its rituals are satirized. And, like the lady of this story, as Ivan Ilyich receives the last sacrament, he is momentarily tempted by the promise of a curative operation.
A decade after writing “Three Deaths,” in August 1869, soon after finishing War and Peace, Tolstoy heard of land for sale in the distant Penza province. As he wrote later, “I wanted to buy an estate so that the income from it, or the timber on it, should cover the whole purchase price and I should get it for nothing. I looked out for some fool who did not understand business, and thought that I had found such a man.” In high good humor, he set out with one servant and decided to cover the long last lap of the journey without stopping. Dozing through the night, he woke with a sudden sense of horror and futility:
“Why am I going? Where am I going to?” I suddenly asked myself. It was not that I did not like the idea of buying an estate cheaply, but it suddenly occurred to me that there was no need for me to travel all that distance, that I should die here in this strange place, and I was filled with dread.
So they stopped at a small post station, woke up the attendant, and were shown into the only bedroom. The place was called Arzamas.
In his biography of Tolstoy, Henri Troyat makes the experience a melodrama in the style of Poe. The room was white and square, “like a big coffin.” The furniture was soiled. “The doors and woodwork [were] painted dark red, a color of dried blood.” Shaken by his sudden horror of death, “questions fell upon him like a flock of ravens. . . . He was the only person awake on a sinking ship.”
Tolstoy’s own account is drier. It is normality that frightens him. “A sleepy man with a spot on his cheek (which seemed to me terrifying) showed us into a small square room with whitewashed walls. I remember it tormented me that it should be square. It had one window with a red curtain.” He fell asleep, only to awake in renewed terror. Death was in the room with him. It followed him into the corridor in search of his sleeping servant. Everything seemed to be saying the same thing: “There is nothing in life. Death is the only real thing, and death ought not to exist.” In what we would now identify as a panic attack, it seems Tolstoy felt he was dying.
Life and death somehow merged into one another. Something was tearing my soul apart and could not complete the severance. . . . Again I went to look at the sleepers, and again I tried to go to sleep. Always the same horror: red, white and square. Something tearing within that yet could not be torn apart. A painful, painfully dry and spiteful feeling, no atom of kindliness. . . .
Like the Ancient Mariner, Tolstoy tried to pray, surreptitiously glancing over his shoulder in case anyone was watching him. In vain. No prayers would come. He woke his servant and they left in the dark. When they reached their destination, Tolstoy did not buy the land. He was forty-one years old.
Another decade passed. As letters to his wife, Sofya, and the reminiscences of his son Sergei testify, Tolstoy continued to experience terrifying intimations of death. When Anna Karenina was finished in 1877, he began A Confession, a self-critical, clear-sighted, autobiographical account of his deepening spiritual crisis. In form, its first half is comparable to the narrative of “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” Decades are sweepingly surveyed, significant moments seized on and coldly scrutinized. The content, too, is similar. Tolstoy categorically condemns his decade of early maturity from about 1845 to 1855, when he indulged his machismo—womanizing, quarreling, even killing in his army years. At that time, he had believed in a popular concept of “progress” as the justifying principle of life. This is comparable to Ivan Ilyich’s determination to fulfill conventional expectations, to live as others do, to achieve the status and acquire the furnishings other people respect. In his Confession, Tolstoy identifies the Paris execution as crucial. It shattered his faith in convention:
When I saw how the head separated from the body, and each separately rattled into its crate, I understood—not in my mind, but my whole being—that no theory of the good sense of Progress, and What Is, can justify this crime, and that if all the people in the world, on whatever theory, from the beginning of the world, should find it necessary—I still knew that it was not necessary but bad. Therefore the judge of what is good and necessary is not what people do and say, and not Progress, but I in my own heart.
The death of his brother Dmitri, Tolstoy says, delivered the second blow to his crumbling faith. Dmitri died in great pain, “not knowing why he lived and even less why he died. No theories could give any answer to these questions, neither to me nor to him.” After some fifteen years of married life, from 1862 to 1877, Tolstoy’s uncertainties intensified. After the night at Arzamas in 1869, there were further experiences that gathered to a great depression, a fundamental spiritual crisis:
So I lived, but five years
ago something very strange started happening to me. I would get moments—at first of blankness, pauses in life, as though I didn’t know how to live, or what I was meant to be doing, and I would get confused and disheartened. But the moments passed, and I would go on as before. Then the blank moments grew more and more frequent and unvaried. And these pauses in life were always expressed in the same words—“For what? And then what?”
At first these just seemed to me to be pointless questions. All this was well known, I thought. If I ever wanted to bother with resolving them, it wouldn’t be worth it. Just at the moment there was no time, but as soon as I had time to pause and think, I’d find the answer. And then the questions posed themselves more and more often till, like spots falling always in the same place, all these questions without answers ran together into one big black stain.
What happened to me was the same as what happens to every terminally ill person. At first there appear trivial signs of inadequacy, which the sick person ignores; then the symptoms repeat themselves more and more often and merge into one continuous suffering. The suffering grows, and the invalid has no time to turn before he recognizes that what he took for slight infirmity is the most important thing in all the world, and that is death.
This passage from A Confession bears a significant relationship to “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” where the metaphor of sickness is literalized, and Ivan Ilyich’s growing sense of spiritual desolation is given a compelling physical cause. Essentially, Ivan Ilyich, in the course of a short mortal illness, recognizes the moral malaise Tolstoy had been fighting for decades.
2
“The Death of Ivan Ilyich” was begun in 1884 and completed in 1886.* Tolstoy’s finest parable, “What Men Live By,” was written in 1881. The unfinished “Memoirs of a Madman” was begun in 1884. The composition of A Confession (1879–1883) overlapped with them all. All four texts throw light on each other.
“Memoirs of a Madman,” though presented as fiction, is essentially autobiographical. It describes Tolstoy’s experience at Arzamas, a similar night of terror in a Moscow hotel, and a comparable experience lost in the snow when out hunting. Each time, the horror lies in his solitary fear of death and his inability to recognize death’s validity: “ ‘Is this death? I won’t have it! Why death? What is it?’ ” The narrator is an ostensible “madman” who is about to be certified. His lunacy lies in his choice of a radical morality that society thinks crazy—the renunciation of worldly goods for a life of selfless charity (hence the story’s first title, “Notes, Not of a Madman”). The ponderous Dostoyevskian irony of the “mad” narrator is unsuited to Tolstoy’s habitual simplicity. Moreover, the genuine, and genuinely disturbed episodes at Arzamas and Moscow do not contribute clearly to the story’s moral conclusion—the practice of love and charity—even though we can see that logically they are Tolstoy’s answer to the horrific futility of life.
Tolstoy illustrates the ideal of love by describing an early episode from the narrator’s childhood. His nanny is about to put him into his cot beside his brother, when he demands to climb in by himself. He has an intense sensation of universal harmony. It might be James Joyce or Stanley Spencer speaking:
I jumped into bed still holding her hand, and then let it go, kicked about under my bedclothes, and wrapped myself up. And I had such a pleasant feeling. I grew quiet and thought: “I love Nurse; Nurse loves me and Mitya; and I love Mitya, and Mitya loves me and Nurse. Nurse loves Taras, and I love Taras, and Mitya loves him. And Taras loves me and Nurse. And Mamma loves me and Nurse, and Nurse loves Mamma and me and Papa—and everybody loves everybody and everybody is happy.”
Then suddenly I heard the housekeeper run in and angrily shout something about a sugar basin and Nurse answering indignantly that she had not taken it. And I felt pained, frightened, and horror, cold horror seized me.
This is his first intimation of madness, as his childish faith in universal love is shattered.
In “What Men Live By” Tolstoy transfers the madman’s visionary clarity to a more authoritative central figure—Michael, a fallen angel. The story was originally written for children. Irony is replaced by directness. God punishes the angel for disobedience by casting him down to earth, naked and destitute. He is to live as a man till he learns the answer to three fundamental questions.
The angel is taken in by a poor cobbler and his wife, and serves them for seven years. In seven years he smiles three times. The first time comes right at the beginning, when the cobbler’s wife is furious with her husband for bringing home this godforsaken down-and-out, the unrecognized angel. She is softened by her husband’s rebuke, fetches the outcast a shirt, and gives him soup. The angel later recalls that when the woman was angry with her husband, “ ‘the spirit of death came from her mouth; I could not speak for the stench of death that spread around her. She wished to drive me out into the cold, and I knew that if she did so she would die.’ ” But when her husband speaks to her of God and she relents, the angel smiles for the first time. “ ‘I saw that death no longer dwelt in her; she had become alive, and in her, too, I saw God.’ ”
In “Memoirs of a Madman” a callous world deems charity insane. In “What Men Live By” Tolstoy goes further—life without love is a living death.
In “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” the laconic parable of “What Men Live By” is replaced by incontrovertible realism. The story opens with the news of Ivan Ilyich’s death. The immediate response of his lawyer colleagues is relief that “he is dead, not I,” and pleasant calculations about the promotions consequent on his vacated place. Tolstoy writes from the point of view of ordinary mankind, whose egotism is natural and immediately recognizable. There is no fallen angel here to tell us this attitude is deathly, no madman to warn us that this response is the world’s folly. “Well, there you go, he’s dead, but I’m not” is a sentiment, as Dr. Johnson would have said, “to which every bosom returns an echo.” And why not? When Ivan Ilyich’s friend Piotr Ivanovich visits the house of mourning, he turns away from the corpse, with its stern reminder for the living. “Such a reminder seemed to Piotr Ivanovich to be out of place here, or at least of no relevance to himself.” Throughout the story’s first section, inevitable death is repeatedly ignored. The faint odor of decaying flesh is dissipated by Gerasim the servant, unobtrusively sprinkling the death chamber with disinfectant. The mourners, formal respects duly paid, hasten away to their evening card tables. And yet the inconvenient fact of death remains—irrepressible as the springs of the ottoman that so discomfit Piotr Ivanovich as he expresses his condolences to Ivan Ilyich’s widow.
In the remaining narrative Tolstoy makes his readers inhabit the death from which Piotr Ivanovich and the other mourners so assiduously avert their eyes. We live it entirely through Ivan Ilyich’s appalled perceptions, as he sickens, suffers, and dies. Tolstoy forces us to confront dying head-on—in the way the lady of “Three Deaths” and his own brother Dmitri writhed against. We watch it with the horrified clarity that has haunted Tolstoy ever since Arzamas.
In the eyes of the world, in the eyes of Ivan Ilyich himself, he has had a successful career—from cheerful child to bright law student; from special assistant to a provincial governor to provincial examining magistrate of the fifth rank to public prosecutor; from the provinces to Petersburg, step after orderly step—till, in the blundering words of Nabokov’s Pnin, he “fell and got in consequence kidney of the cancer.”
And yet, implicitly, indirectly, Tolstoy shows Ivan Ilyich’s smoothly absorbed progress to be a gradual spiritual death. This is subtly, almost imperceptibly charted in his diminishing concern for justice and growing appetite for power. It is evident in his scrupulously professional preference for the efficient administration of general codes over individual factors and personal predicaments—his habitual practice “to exclude all the raw, living matter that inevitably clogs the smooth running of official business.” With deathly consistency he applies the same principles to his own life, methodically denying ev
ery aspect of his own individuality in the pursuit of unimpeachable conformity and the public registers of success. Never has a story dwelt so insistently on “decorum,” “high propriety,” the “duty . . . to live a decent life that everyone approved of,” “external dignity,” “that propriety of external forms required by public opinion” that governs every choice made by Ivan Ilyich. His moral desiccation is even more painfully apparent in his growing coldness, his frank distaste for his quarrelsome wife and daughter, and the deeply unsympathetic lovelessness that intensifies as his illness grows worse.
Thus Ivan Ilyich’s shriveled spirit comes to display the aridity Tolstoy experienced at Arzamas, that “painfully dry and spiteful feeling, no atom of kindliness, a dull and steady spitefulness” toward himself and the unfeeling world. The reader coming to “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” with no knowledge of the thoughts and experiences that culminated in its composition may not realize that Ivan Ilyich’s dying began long before his illness struck. Tolstoy, however, recognized at Arzamas that “it seems that death is terrible, but . . . it is one’s dying life that is terrible.” In his successful years Ivan Ilyich is like the angry cobbler’s wife before charity softens her. The smell of death is all around him.
